I think many many people will be dissapointed with the rasp pi in general simply because the desktop performance is jaw droppingly sluggish and because the software component of the package isnt fully working properly yet.
[ ... ]
it's an educational device, and education means learning and learning requires patience [...]

I suppose it depends on what they are expecting. The foundation have always been open about the fact that the RPi will run desktop applications about as well as a ten-year-old computer.

The device perfectly fulfills its brief, as far as I am concerned. It's a £25 Linux computer and it's easy to learn to program using it.

Having said that, you certainly have a point. I hope that young people will buy this device in significant numbers and use it for the purpose for which it was intended. I am worried, though, that some young people will be put off by the lack of power and speed. While I can relate to Eben Upton talking about the days when your computer invited you to learn programming, it is the case that we did not have access to the range of devices that today's young people are used to.

It would be a shame if this machine is more popular with hackers like ourselves than its intended target market!

its only the typical desktop/ internet/ web browsing/ youtube and such type stuff (how the average 14 yo girl uses firefox) and more demanding apps that dont use the accelerated GPU (gimp etc....) that performance is an issue...
and also compiling even relatively small programs seems to take forever as its CPU intensive (the CPU is the only weak link performance wise)

games are just fine (uses accelerated GPU)
playing videos clips in mp4 or whatever format is good (uses GPU)
programming type stuff is good (performance is never an issue anyway)
server type stuff is good (ie. webserver, fileserver/ ftp server/ proxy server etc... performance is never really an issue anyway)

I'm hoping to use a Pi as a network server (connected to a usb disk drive) to act as a NAS type thing, and also as a PXE boot server. Do you think that is a reasonable expectation sickgut?

yes, it should be able to do that kind of thing easily. Im intending on releasing an all in one server type solution as the first step in the "Debian to be kinda like Puppy" ... Pussy... like OS that i have promised to make for the Rasp

Hi Lobster,
I can't seem to get the bootmanager to recognise the devx.
Also, I turned off utf-8 and it stopped lots of things working. I had to start again with a fresh copy of the SD card _________________My System:Arch-Arm on RPi!
"RacyPy" puplet on Toshiba Tecra 8200. PIII, 256 MB RAM.
RaspberryPy: Lobster and I blog about the RPi.

I remember you saying that you hadn't had much joy getting tkinter to "do stuff". These are my first efforts at some programs that actually do something ...

Also, FWIW, that invader game I got posted on Frambozenbier does work (at least on my Arch set-up).
mark_________________My System:Arch-Arm on RPi!
"RacyPy" puplet on Toshiba Tecra 8200. PIII, 256 MB RAM.
RaspberryPy: Lobster and I blog about the RPi.

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